Butterfly

This is another one derived from data for the sandplotters at Sisyphus Industries.
https://sisyphus-industries.com/
The first time I did it I started it going, watched the first part and then went off to work in the yard.
It drew a little bit too big.

So I shrunk it by 10%.

I made videos of both of them. Since this is just drawing the path and not stopping to draw circles it only takes about an hour to draw either one so it appears to move much faster than in previous videos. It is actually sped up by the same amount as the longer videos on previous days.
I also see that I need to cover the window next to the doodler when I film these during the day time.

This one is Amazing

This one has 6680 x,y points. It fills the memory of the Arduino board to 96%. It took an hour and a half to draw. Here is the timelapse.

I used a different drawing technique for this one. I took one step forward, two steps back and two steps forward each time. Due to the way the doodler works the pen doesn't always repeat so that made some of the lines thicker than others. I got the data for this pattern from the exchange forum for these drawing machines:
https://sisyphus-industries.com/

Tumbling Blocks

This one is for my quilt friends.

Here is a faster time lapse.

Here it is a little slower.

I broke it

I was plotting the other day and all of a sudden the pen scooted off the board and hit the wall.

One of the bobbins that wind up the fishline had broken it's glue joint.
I got a new bobbin and glued it back on with JB Weld.

Then I ran a couple of calibration plots to see how well it worked.

The diagonal lines are the result of the bobbins not being centered on the motor shaft. There are lines at right angles to the left motor that I didn't fix but very few at right angles to the right motor. Comparing these to ones that I made back in March I think I did a better job of centering the bobbin this time.

Steam

This took just over 6 hours. I might be able to speed it up to 4 hours.

Here is a speedup of the time lapse, just under 2 minutes.

Here is the regular speed time lapse, over 10 minutes.

harmonograph

I tried simulating what a harmonograph would draw. The harmonograph is an old mechanical drawing device that predates the spirograph by about 100 years. Here are some links explaining it.
http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/harmonographs.html
http://www.karlsims.com/harmonograph/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonograph

valentines 2014 revisited

This took almost two hours to draw. Condensed down into just over three minutes of  video.

This is based on a stamp that Stampin Up used to sell. It was scanned, traced, stippled and turned into an SVG file. Then I extracted the data with a text editor, tweaked it with Excel and put it into the arduino. It draws a six dot wide circle at each point. There are 4810 circles.

about as good as it gets

I switched to a new pen because the other one ran out of ink. This one is thinner, more like a pen than a marker. It draws a finer line.

Here is the timelapse. Photos taken every two seconds with my laptop camera. Output fifteen photos per second.

tried to fix it

I swapped the SIN and COS functions around. That had the effect of rotating the picture a quarter turn and drawing in the opposite direction. I didn't have time for it to finish last night but what it did worked pretty good. I will try again when I have more time and film it.

six nodes one hundred rounds timelapse

I stitched over 3000 photos together into a little over three minute video.

It messes up part way through but is still mesmerizing to watch.

six nodes one hundred rounds

I tried this one last night. As it moved down on the left side the pen would kind of stick to the board and didn't slide nicely. I think at one point it stuck enough to cause the bobbin to lose a wrap of string. All the lines after that were out of place. I did have the laptop set up to take a picture every two seconds. I am working on pasting them all together into a video. Any suggestions on good software to do that would be appreciated.

It may be time to move up to more powerful motors and a better motor driver.

six node time lapse oops again

It messed up while drawing the six node figure also and I stopped it part way through. I haven't drawn it right yet.

five node time lapse oops

I went off to Dairy Queen to get supper while it was drawing. The string caught on the knot in the bobbin and wound up when it thought it was unwinding. There are a couple of frames of my wife putting the pen gondola back on the front of the board.

I redid it so you can see what it is supposed to look like.

four node time lapse

three node time lapse

Two nodes time lapse

One

I'm experimenting with time lapse using the camera on my laptop.

Some old favorites

I'm starting over with learning how to use this after having it stored away for so long. It took some time last night just to figure out how to program a spiral in the Arduino language. I know I've drawn this before but I wanted to see with the new piece of fish line how consistently it would draw. The waves you can see in the pattern are caused by two things I think. As the string piles up on the bobbins it causes it to move a different distance with each step. The bobbins are not perfectly aligned with the center of the motor since they are just glued on with epoxy and I think that accounts for a lot of the waves as well.
I have a variable in the program for how long it pauses between steps of the motors. If it tries to move too fast it looses steps. The fastest it can move is about 10 milliseconds between steps. For this picture I had it delaying 30 milliseconds. I had it increasing the radius of the spiral by 5 motor steps for each time around.
Now I want to try a rectangular pattern and see how consistent it is.

blew the dust off after a long rest

I finally got this out of storage yesterday. This was the last thing I had been working on in April 2014.